ANET: Technical and Future Challenges with a Real Time Vehicular Traffic Simulation

Hayder Khzaali Int. Journal of Engineering Research and Application www.ijera.com
ISSN : 2248-9622, Vol. 6, Issue 6, ( Part -5) June 2016, pp.54-59
www.ijera.com 54 | P a g e
VANET: Technical and Future Challenges with a Real Time
Vehicular Traffic Simulation
Hayder Khzaali
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Florida Institute of Technology, Florida, USA
ABSTRACT
VANET or Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network is a special type of MANET or Mobile Ad-Hoc Network that is
designed specifically for communications between vehicles or V2V and vehicles to infrastructure or V2I. There
is a lot of studies and research that has been dedicated to study this technology due to its importance and
necessity in our life. The fact that each and every module presented must be tested thoroughly before putting it
into action, as there will be severe consequences in case of a system malfunction especially if it's a vehicular
design problem. However, seeing VANETS coming into reality becomes very close with the advancement of
IEEE 802.11p standard that is being dedicated to the DSRC or dedicated short range communication [1]. This
paper will discuss this technology emphasizing some of its applications, current limitations and future challenges
plus simulating a real traffic using SUMO and OpenStreetMap.
Keywords: Ad-Hoc Networks, DSRC, MANET, OpenStreetMap, SUMO, VANET, V2I, V2V.
I. INTRODUCTION
VANT as stated is one application of
mobile ad-hoc networking which provides vehicle to
vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure interactions that
will facilitate safe and secure transportation during
hazard situations, or unexpected events from other
vehicles, that might happen in the road. V2V
communications mechanism is done through
efficient routing techniques. The motive that derived
scientists and engineers to study and develop this
technology for many years was because of its
potential significance that will take the driving
experience to a whole new level, plus the
economical implications of this technology. To make
the picture more clearly in regarding to the
economical benefits, let's put some numbers to it.
According to the statistics taken from the United
States Department Of Transportation or DOT, this
technology will theoretically save about 1.3 trillion
dollars every year in US alone, that's 8% of US GDB
(Gross Domestic Product) or nearly 115 % of the
defense budget. About half a trillion dollars comes
from accidents avoidance, almost 32000 thousand
people being killed on the US roads every year and
millions injured. The savings from not killing those
people estimated by the EPA (Environmental
Protection Agency) and DOT have come up with to
reach half a trillion dollars. Additional half a trillion
dollars comes from productivity gains and about
three billion dollars comes from fuel efficiency gains
that falls down to gas plus congestion savings. The
statistics shows that the global numbers can easily
reaches up to five trillion dollars a year, hence, the
dollar-cost savings alone makes it necessary to apply
V2V and V2I in the roads as soon as possible.
II. OBJECTIVE
The main objective of this paper is to
provide a brief overview of VANT technology and
its applications, emphasizing its advantages and
some of the technical implementation impairments.
Additionally, a simulation will also be presented
using SUMO and OpenStreetmap applications
illustrating a nice module for providing a clear
picture of how V2V based on ad-hoc wireless
networking technology works in real time situation.
III. HOW VANET WORKS
The number of Vehicles that exists in a
VANET system in the world today approximately
exceed 750 million vehicle [2]. Each vehicle or node
is able to communicate with other vehicles within its
vicinity using a protocol called dedicated short range
communication or DSRC for short. The frequency
spectrum allocated for this wireless type of
communication must be in the 75 MHz licensed
spectrum or around 5.9 GHz, in compression to the
IEEE 802.11a that only operates in the unlicensed
portions of the frequency band. The theoretical
maximum range for wireless communication is 300
feet or 1000 meter and the max allowable speed for
each vehicle is 120 mph for efficient communication
to happen according to DOT. The Ad-Hoc
terminology used in V2V means that all nodes can
communicate with each other without any kind of
central management or in another words it can be
called infrastructure less type of network. However,
RESEARCH ARTICLE OPEN ACCESS

there is what is called RSUs (road side units) which
act like access points that can store a variety of
information for other cars that passes by the
coverage area of these APs. This information will be
valuable for other cars that will go through the same
route in the future, especially if there is no direct
communication between cars passing through the
same route in different timings. Each vehicle has an
on board unit (OBU) that stores all non-private
information about the car, like speed, GPS position,
acceleration and heading.
figure (1) VANET structure
IV. VANET APPLICATIONS
Both safety and efficiency should be
considered in the design of VANET applications.
For example, in the case of a car accident or road
maintenance issue that might happen suddenly on the
main road, that will lead to the temporary block or a
stifling road congestion. Therefore, a message being
sent reporting this event containing a warning sign to
all nearby vehicles will be of a great importance.
The drivers of those vehicles will now have the
awareness of this road hazard and not only that, V2V
communications will also provide suggestions
(based on car's GPS information) for alternative
route to choose from. Different types of data being
monitored by VANET applications including
weather conditions, nature of the road, approaching
vehicles information and nearby roads. The relevant
data will be exchanged between mobile nodes
(vehicles) for different purposes using wireless
communication and below are few types of VANET
applications:
4.1 Safety Applications
The most significant goal of VANET
applications is safety that involves two major factors,
delay and reliability. If an accident or a collision
occurs in the road, two issues need to be taken care
of instantly: accident location and awareness of
upcoming vehicles to this spot. All nearby nodes
should be alerted and transmission delay is not
prohibited whatsoever. Therefore, using efficient
routing protocol is a critical for V2V
communication. Simple type of applications that
triggers a warning message to a call center that
transfer this information to a rescue personal or
emergency responders are already being used like
GM's and OnStar system [3]. It has been hopped that
for a future safety application it will take it a step
further, for instance and depending on the location
of the accident form approaching cars specially if
they are coming fast within a certain speed limit that
these applications may send several fast warning
messages, automatically reducing the speed of the
car or even triggering the emergency breaking
system for these vehicles to avoid a possible
collision. Of course, these applications should also
be designed to prevent road disasters from happing
in the first place by acting proactively to provide
drivers with early alarm messages in time to prevent
accidents from happening.
4.2 Efficiency Applications
Efficiency applications can be further
subdivided into two sections according to the desired
goals: intersections in cross roads applications and
congestion management applications.
4.2.1 Intersections in Cross Roads
An important research area in VANET
technology is traffic control management. For
instance, vehicles passing through an intersection
have a higher probability of collision where at least
two or may be more traffic flows converge. In this
scenario, V2V and V2I communications between
vehicles is necessary (specially, if there is no traffic
lights available ) to maintain smooth flow of traffic
by alarming vehicles drivers ahead of time to wait
for another vehicle heading from different direction
(oblivious to the diver) to take the proper decision.
4.2.2 Congestion Management Problem
The best scenario to illustrate this issue is
when a traffic jam occurs in a road. The goal here is
establishing V2V communications to provide an
alternate route for upcoming vehicles that will pass
through the same road after a short period of time, to
insure a nice smooth flow of movement and reduce
roads traffic jam.
4.3 Comfort Applications
It includes all applications that provide the
driver with useful information during the desired
trip. For instance close by restaurants and hotels, gas
stations, parking locations, city leisure and tourist’s
information and other services that V2I
communication provides from nearby RSUs.

4.4 Urban Sensing
VANET system can be considered as a
network paradigm for urban sensing. A huge number
of vehicles in an urban areas can be expected with an
on board sensing unit installed in each one. This
high concentration of Vehicles play a significant role
in urban sensing [4][5].There are hopes to integrate
smart-phones applications with VANET sensors to
further provide a great potential future for urban
monitoring[6][7]. Since vehicles are not restricted by
energy consumptions and other constrains and can
be equipped with intensive processing units, a
variety of sensing equipments like chemical
detectors, acoustic sensors and video cameras can be
imbedded into these nodes. This will present a
massive opportunity for a big-scale VANET
applications, making it a promising area of research.
V. FUTURE PERSPECTIVE AND
CHALLENGES
Realizing VANET future perspectives
requires providing efficient solutions for the
challenges that may face this technology. Below are
some of these problems that should be addressed:
5.1 Information Management and Storage
It is expectable to have millions of vehicles
in a big scale vehicular network. This huge number
means more data must be stored and shared in an
efficient and organized manner across VANETs as
mentioned in [8][9]. This continual network
expansion with the rise of the amount of data being
produced besides VANET dynamic properties will
pose a new challenge for data management in this
technology.
5.2 Localization Systems
Accurate localization is required for highly
sensitive applications in VANETs. One suggestion
to achieve this task is to put a navigation device in
each mobile node, a satellite GPS for instance. The
problem with this system however is the undesired
problems that comes with the satellite based
positioning applications like loss of connection due
to weather conditions and other factors. Several
techniques has been suggested to address this issue
[10]. For example, Cellular localization, matching of
maps, Image and video processing, Dead Reckoning
and distributed ad-hoc localization. However, none
of these techniques mange to solve all the problems
relative to node position computing. What makes
this issue more challenging is that the nature of
roads, speed of nodes and drivers behavior that make
the network topology changes rapidly with time,
which will lead to an outdated positioning
information. One approach to handle this task is to
apply a module that predict vehicles position in the
future by studying its path history and there are
many researches in this field.
5.3 Security and Privacy
Besides the common wireless security and
privacy problems, security challenge is a major issue
because of the large scale of vehicular network in
VANETs, nodes mobility, rapid changing in network
topology and the variety of applications being used.
Another factor posing a threat here is the possibility
of network attacks by intruders or hackers. VANETs
must meet the security requirement by applying
novel protocol solutions with certain characteristics
[11]: minimum number of hopes required for
communication between nodes, very little overhead
due to the sensitivity of time and enhanced
information dissemination solutions. Additionally,
privacy limitations for exchanged information must
be addressed as well. For example, the exchanged
data between nodes should not include private
information like the driver license number or name
of the vehicle's driver. Despite the fact that many
efforts and studies has been done to manage security
and privacy problems, still there are needs for highly
secure communication protocols due the unique
nature of heterogeneous vehicular networks.
5.4 Tracking Targets
Tracking a targets is a fundamental
functionally in VANET networks since vehicles
physical locations defines wireless communications
patterns. However, tracking targets are not trivial,
there should be some kind of a mechanism that
predicts vehicles future physical locations depending
on the previous path that these mobile nodes had
followed [12]. As mentioned earlier, Privacy
problem should be considered in defining a proposed
solution.
5.5 Standardization of Protocols
Different types of mobile nodes (cars,
tracks, motorbikes, bicycles or others) from different
venders are considered in VANETs. Therefore, they
all must talk efficiently with each other (exchange
wireless information) using a unified language or
protocol and a standard effort by government,
academia and industry is the only way to make this
happen.
5.6 Interaction with Other Networks
Interaction with other nearby wireless
networks within range present a whole new area of
applications and services to the users. For instance,
information about weather conditions, close by
restaurants, gas stations, hospitals, police stations
and others. This type of information can be provided

through interactions with the Internet, other sensor
networks or services.
5.7 Variable Density Networks
In rural areas or in a high ways scenario,
not so many vehicles are present on the roads, this
will lead to a sporadic connectivity. Therefore, there
is a need for a protocol to be aware of this irregular
connections. However, in urban areas, hundreds of
mobile nodes are expected in a small area. The
proposed protocol in this case should address this
scheme to avoid transmission errors and data packets
collisions. Additionally, mobile nodes that travels
between the two scenarios stated above should have
an adaptive protocol to adapt their behavior
depending on the variation of network density to
maintain a good data exchange.
5.8 Network Fragmentation
Another problem in rural or light traffic
areas is the network fragmentation issue that will
pose a challenging task for network designers.
Network fragmentation makes some mobile nodes
unreachable. This scenario is expected during the
first implementation of VANET when only small
percent of vehicles will be equipped with
transceivers and this will lead to a frequent
fragmentation in the network [13].Therefore,
traditional protocols that depend on nodes topology
information are not suitable for handling this
problem in VANETs and new approaches should be
studied and presented.
VI. VANET SIMULATION
Traffic simulations make the evaluation of any
changes in infrastructure and policy more feasible
before applying them in real life. For example, the
performance of a traffic light control algorithms or
V2I and V2V communications may be examined
well before being implemented in streets.
VANET being implemented here using a simulation
of urban mobility (SUMO) and Openstreetmap.
SUMO is an open traffic simulation suite and free
application that exist since 2011. Intermodal traffic
systems are being modeled by SUMO like,
pedestrians public transport and road vehicles. Many
tools can be embedded with SUMO to handle
various tasks, for example visualization, route
findings and others. It also can be further enhanced
with custom models to supply many APIs for
managing the simulation remotely. The reason for
choosing SUMO as a simulation tool here is because
of its many features including online interaction,
multimodal traffic simulation, no limitations in
number of simulated vehicles or network size,
support several formats like Openstreetmap, NavTeq
and others. Also SUMO is implemented using C++
and portable libraries only. Openstreet map on the
other hand is a web application that provides terrain
details like roads, bridges, intersections and others
for any area around the globe. This road map is than
integrated with SUMO using specific command lines
and other tools to help in building up the simulation.
For this simulation the module chosen is of
an area in my country IRAQ/Baghdad which
illustrates few roads meeting up at an intersection
and others converging into a public square to give an
idea of V2V communications between vehicles. The
Platform used is windows 7 Ultimate 2009 64-bit
operating system.
After running the simulation, and focusing
on areas when collisions might happen (for example
a roundabout or circular intersection) to make sure
that ad-hoc wireless communications work properly
between mobile nodes. The following can be
noticed:
Figure (2) roundabout intersection - at 149 sec
According to "Fig. 2" it's clear that vehicle
D is standing by without movement because vehicle
A and two other vehicles are occupying the
intersection. It can also be noticed that vehicle A had
a prior knowledge of vehicle's D position and
movement status. Therefore, it continued its
movement. So even if there is no LOS between
vehicles they still communicate through V2V
communication and exchange status information.
Figure (3) roundabout intersection - at 162 sec.

As shown above in "Fig. 3", vehicles B and C
also entered the intersection and behave the same
way that vehicle D did again with no line of sight
between vehicles.
Figure (4) roundabout intersection - at 172 sec
In "Fig. 4", Its now noticeable that all
standby vehicles (B, Cand D) moved though the
intersection after it was cleared from incoming
traffic. Although there was no traffic light in the
intersection to control vehicles movement nor a clear
line of sight between them, they still obtain each
other position and mobility status through vehicle to
vehicle communication or V2V. Thus, letting the
vehicles drivers to make the right decision at the
right time.
VII. CONCLUSION
Perhaps the most significant achievements of
ad-hoc networking is VANET. Thousands of
vehicles accidents has been recorded every year,
around the world. Smart Intelligent Transportation
system (SITS) has been an active area of research
for many years, as it saves lives, money and time. In
this paper, some brief history behind the motive that
derived the interest in developing this technology
has been discussed. Both V2V and V2I types of
communication are used in VANET, specific routing
protocols for each wireless network design
architecture should be implemented to achieve
security, reliability, data rate and maximum possible
range. Several VANET applications had been
debated in brief discussion along with some future
perspectives and challenges that will face the
implementation phase of this technology. Finally, a
virtual VANET V2V infrastructure illustrating a real
time traffic in an urban area had been presented
through a simulator to give an idea of one example
from the endless applications of this technology that
will present a new era of intelligent vehicular
traveling system.
VIII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Author would like to take this opportunity
and show the gratitude to Dr.Carlos E. Otero, who is
a Faculty member at Florida Institute of Technology/
Electrical and Computer Engineering (Florida,
USA), who provided me with guidance and support
to complete this task.
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